What a Coach Isn’t

By now you should have a good idea of what a coach is, and it’s probably useful at this point to summarise what we aren’t.

As a coach

We aren’t a psychotherapist or counsellor much though we can tread softly through some of your most private thoughts and feelings.

We aren’t a priest for when you want to say confession but we will listen impartially to what you say

We aren’t a doctor, who can tell you what the matter is and give you medicine for it – although we can help you find the cure to your problems.

We aren’t a personal trainer who can get you fit physically, but we can help you get mentally fit to take action.

We aren’t a mentor, setting ourselves as the expert and we aren’t a business advisor either, ready with commercial solutions.

We aren’t your friend to call up on a whim, but we will be here for you when we say we will.

What we are is a place to come to talk through issues and challenges confidentially. We expect you to take responsibility for yourself and resolve your own issues. This means that we rarely give you advice (unless you’re really stuck – see my last post) . By doing so, it means that we’re designing your solutions for you instead of helping you to clarify the possible choices that are available to you. It’s up to you to take responsibility for getting the results that you want. How committed you are towards this is how successful you’ll be at achieving your goals.

Finally as a Coach we will help you to identify the steps you need to take, big or small, hard or smooth, to be able to step forward and shrug off negative behaviours and patterns. We’ll look at how to do this later in the series in my next blog post – Monitoring your Progress. Next week we consider what questions to ask before you hire a coach.